Kittens With Jet Packs? Not Yet, but These Inventors Are on It

It was the end of a three-day binge of invention in March 2009. Bre Pettis, Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer had locked themselves in a bare cement room in Downtown Brooklyn pretty much around the clock. No one was hollering Eureka; they had to chase screws that rolled under the table.

They were building a three-dimensional printer, a machine that works like an inkjet printer except that it squirts molten plastic, not ink. The layers of plastic rise into almost any shape — bolts, tools, toys — based on digital models sent to the printer from a computer.

“We were making a machine that makes things,” Mr. Pettis said. “We’d say to people: ‘Right now, you can download books and movies. Someday you’re going to be able to download things.’ ”

In fact, commercial versions of three-dimensional printers have been around for decades, but generally are the size of refrigerators and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Jay Leno has one that he uses to make custom parts for his vintage cars. Engineers and designers use them to make one-of-a-kind models.

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The MakerBot, a do-it-yourself version of a 3-D printer invented in Brooklyn.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

“We wanted a 3-D printer and we couldn’t afford one, so we made one,” Mr. Pettis said. “It’s not rocket science. We decided to use off-the-shelf parts, and make it accessible, so anyone could have one.”

For months, the machine would run fine during tests, but then jam up when they tried to print something. Finally, around 8 one morning, they watched the first fruit of their creation come off the printer: a shot glass. It cost them under $1,000, and hundreds of hours of labor.

“We promptly drank some sort of deadly, hard alcohol,” Mr. Pettis said. “It was horrible, but it was a celebration.”

Two hours later, Mr. Pettis got on a flight to Austin, Tex., for the South by Southwest Festival, checking the invention with the luggage. The group called it a MakerBot, a robot that makes things. He went on a pub crawl and parked the machine on the bars. “I started printing out shot glasses,” Mr. Pettis said. “Bartenders love robots.”

The technology tide is rising in New York. Hundreds of people gather every month for sold-out meetings of the New York Tech Meet Up; a group called HackNY sponsors summer fellowships for students with startup companies and organizes 24-hour hackathons, in which college kids from the metropolitan area spend the night creating clever turns on existing software. The idea, said Evan Korth, a professor at New York University who is one of HackNY’s organizers, is to nurture a culture of innovation so that the best young computer scientists don’t get absorbed by Wall Street. Software incubators are taking over acres of office space around Union Square. More technology venture capital was invested in New York last year than in Massachusetts.

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Two products of the MakerBot.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

We are still in the Big Bang moments of the digital age, and the clouds of atoms have not settled into recognizable forms. On Friday, Mr. Pettis led the way up four flights of steep wooden steps to the top floor of a 19th-century building in Boerum Hill that had once been occupied by the Long Island Brewing Company.

This is the home of NYC Resistor, a hacker collective on Third Avenue. Nine people, including Mr. Pettis, put up $1,000 each to set up space in 2007 that would have tools for hacking — meaning, redoing software and machines to their liking. The rooms were done in late college-dorm finest. Long tables, a fridge, a seating area of a vintage couch and chairs. And tools: a laser cutting machine. A disc jockey’s kit.

“It’s a force for chaos in the world, where we take the approach of trying things out regardless of whether things are going to work out or not,” he said. “Something’s a horrible idea? Let’s try it.”

The group that created the 3-D MakerBot printer — Mr. Pettis, 38, Mr. Smith, 27, and Mr. Mayer, 35 — first met at NYC Resistor, and did much of their initial work there. With $75,000 raised from friends and family, they set up MakerBot Industries and started taking orders for the kits in March 2009. The first 100 sold out within a few months. So far, the company, with 30 employees, has sold 4,000 kits for making MakerBot. The latest version is called “Thing-O-Matic,” and costs $1,299. Hobbyists, do-it-yourself families and schools have bought them.

“We push the limits of what is possible, and enjoy the failures,” Mr. Pettis said. “You come into the hacker space, and you expect to see kittens in jet packs, flying around the place.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on March 5, 2011, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Kittens With Jet Packs? Not Yet, But These Inventors Are on It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe